Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: PlanetCultist on April 20, 2023, 05:41:50 PM

Title: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: PlanetCultist on April 20, 2023, 05:41:50 PM

Considering how well-renowned the story of this game is, does anyone have a favourite area or specific piece of the game's lore?

Title: Re: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: MysticWind on May 13, 2023, 01:05:40 AM

Definitely not my favorite, and not really in the game (so you can choose for it not to be canon, which I don't), but I find it hilarious that in the GURPS SMAC sourcebook that the British royalty family was killed off, probably solely to retroactively justify why Deirdre is from Free Scotland and to ramp up the dystopian nature of the setting.

(https://imgur.com/L4BNi9h.png)

Title: Re: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: Misanthrope on May 13, 2023, 06:57:07 AM

ABSOLUTELY!!

We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
~ Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7
Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED

NOTHING Is so fundamentally shocking or disturbing as this clip.
There is no way to know this is NOT us.
EVERYTHING Else has something it is attached to, and can be proved.
How do you know that you are NOT a brain in a tank?

Title: Re: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: Geo on May 14, 2023, 10:32:59 AM

Quote from: Misanthrope on May 13, 2023, 06:57:07 AM

EVERYTHING Else has something it is attached to, and can be proved.
How do you know that you are NOT a brain in a tank?

Because you poke at a computer?  :P

Title: Re: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: magic9mushroom on June 14, 2023, 02:38:58 PM

Quote from: MysticWind on May 13, 2023, 01:05:40 AM

Definitely not my favorite, and not really in the game (so you can choose for it not to be canon, which I don't), but I find it hilarious that in the GURPS SMAC sourcebook that the British royalty family was killed off, probably solely to retroactively justify why Deirdre is from Free Scotland and to ramp up the dystopian nature of the setting.

It's not clear whether that's "killed off" in the sense of "disestablished" or in the sense of "killed all known heirs".

The latter would be Very Hard; the most recent time the British line of succession was culled was over 300 years ago - limiting it to descendants of Sophia of Hanover - and there are roughly 5,000 known heirs. It's not like the Japanese royal family, which got very harshly culled in 1945 and then got unlucky with breeding so there's a real possibility of extinction.

(The whole "last known heir" plot in fiction doesn't make a lot of sense in general when the family's centuries old. Even in a static population, the number of descendants of X person generally grows as 2^n where n is the number of generations since X, and in a growing population you multiply by the growth factor; the number of descendants of Mohammed, for instance, is something like 20-100 million. Deltora Quest gets away with this because very soon after the kingdom's founding evil viziers started deliberately coaching the royals to have exactly one child and hunting down other descendants of the founder Adin, and because it's eventually revealed that there are still a bunch of distant heirs that escaped the net; most other fiction with this plot, like TES IV, has no such excuse.)

Title: Re: Favourite piece of SMAC lore
Post by: MysticWind on June 18, 2023, 04:59:56 AM

Quote from: magic9mushroom on June 14, 2023, 02:38:58 PM

It's not clear whether that's "killed off" in the sense of "disestablished" or in the sense of "killed all known heirs".

The latter would be Very Hard; the most recent time the British line of succession was culled was over 300 years ago - limiting it to descendants of Sophia of Hanover - and there are roughly 5,000 known heirs. It's not like the Japanese royal family, which got very harshly culled in 1945 and then got unlucky with breeding so there's a real possibility of extinction.

I interpreted it as like what the Bolsheviks did to the Romanovs, which surprisingly went even further than Nicholas II's immediate family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov#Killing_of_other_Romanovs). Meaning that enough major figures were gone to really put a damper on the idea of royal restoration. Certainly, there would still be claimants and pretenders around, but perhaps they would be tangential and unimportant enough to make elevating them unpopular. Not to mention conflicting claims.

Anyway, it's one of those bits from the GURPS sourcebook that I don't take seriously because it's just so bonkers and completely unreferenced in any of the other extended SMAC material, whether it's the faction bios on the Firaxis website (https://alphacentauri2.info/official/factions.html) or any of Michael Ely's novellas or novels. Seems like an excessive way to justify Deirdre being from Free Scotland, like I suggested.